MQMON – MQ Tool for Admins and Testers

Posted by Vivek on May 7, 2011

You might have come across many tools which allow you to communicate with message queues. Reading a message from queue and writing a message to queue are very common operations especially in projects where guaranteed messaging is extremely important. However, handling messages in queue is sometimes cumbersome.

Some of the tedious operations are reading a message which is somewhere in the middle (as queue operates in LIFO fashion). Putting messages in bulk into the queue and getting/ browsing multiple messages at a time are handy. Indexing is also important to identify the position of message in queue. It is imperative that an MQ tool should support all these features.

Those who install IBM MQ use MQ explorer wizard but it does not offer features mentioned above. Nor does it allow to view the message properly.

Performance testing cannot be performed unless messages can be published in bulk. Also, it is always better to save the Queue Manager settings to save some time and effort. These are some of the benefits that are offered by MQ Monitor tool (Also known as MO71) It can be downloaded from IBM site http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24000142.

It provides a simplified GUI and is a very useful tool for Administrators and testers. Here is how it can be used and has an edge over other tools.

1. A freeware, this tool allows you to create connections to queue managers and save them for future use.

2. Allows you to index the messages and export them to a file.

3. Able to read the file and insert messages in queue based on index. This makes it simpler to modify any message in file and put it back in queue.

4. Searching an element/ word/ value in message is easy when the message is written to a file.

5. Easy to navigate through all the queues. (List of queues can be seen using Queue List option. Search and filter options can be used)

6. Statistics can be easily calculated. Channel administration is supported.